The Raddest of Times

For the past year, I've been writing a feature film script for two, talented producer/directors. To say it's been one of the challenges of my career would be the understatement of the decade.

This is the fourth feature I've written, but it doesn't seem to matter. In the past year, I've studied movies. And I've read every screenplay book I can think of. Twice. And of course, I've spent hundreds of hours sitting in front of a computer, creating this character or writing that scene. Simply put, it's just extremely difficult to write a good movie.

A few years back, I can remember laughing at the movie poster for "Beverly Hills Chihuahua." "What a stupid movie," I thought. "What an easy script." And then when the movie went on to gross over 100 million dollars, I felt jaded. Cheated, even. "How on Earth could such a silly thing make so much money? Meanwhile all these great indie film writers toil on their scripts with nothing to show for it." Well, this year, as I struggled through a myriad of structure sessions and long, difficult scenes, I thought of that yappy dog movie. And the thought occurred to me that it probably wasn't easy to write at all. Through this journey, I'm learning once more that even the things that seem most simple are often glaringly complex to craft. Either that, or I simply have no writing talent.

Currently, there are over 100 hours of content on YouTube for each of the 7.6 billion people on Earth. There is Netflix. There is Hulu. There is Amazon Prime. There are television networks and film studios. There are podcasts, Instagram feeds, books, and magazines. Oh, and Apple is about to drop into the already crowded world of content creation.

Basically, for the first time in the history of the world, there's too much stuff to watch. Far too much to consume.

So how does one write another film that will actually engage someone? How does a creator avoid merely casting another droplet into this massive, international sea of movies, shows, and videos?

Honestly, I haven't the foggiest.

Five years ago, I thought I had it all figured out. I had just finished writing my third feature and thought, "Hey, this is pretty good. There's no reason this can't be made into a great movie." Of course, it never was, but I still believed that I had cracked some sort of ethereal code. 

Well, I haven't. But as the film life goes, you just keep on keeping on. You hope that somehow you can take the impossible and make it possible. That you can suspend your own disbelief just long enough to once again believe in the magic of it all. And that somehow, a year or two from now, four hundred people will sit in a dark theater, with rapt attention, and see something for the first time that you've already seen a thousand and one times.

I still don't have the foggiest how that is going to happen. But I'll let you know if it does.